While the U.S. has seen a wealth of portable game consoles released across the continent, many never had the opportunity even to make it to store shelves. Allow us to introduce you to two such portables: The Gamate and WonderSwan

GAMATE: THE MAIL ORDER PORTABLEThe Gamate was launched by a Taiwan-based company called Bit Corporation in 1990. With previous experience cloning consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Famicom, Bit Corporation decided to develop a portable that would hopefully cash in on the success of the Nintendo Game Boy. The monochrome handheld featured hardware specifics that came close to duplicating the Game Boy but had a significantly inferior LCD screen and mono speaker. Due to how many different distributors were given the right to sell the Gamate, it is difficult to track just how many countries it was available in.

WONDERSWAN: THE JAPANESE EXCLUSIVEJust days before the October launch of the Nintendo Game Boy Color in Japan, Japanese toy conglomerate Bandai announced that they would officially be releasing their portable handheld called the WonderSwan in March of 1999. Bandai knew that entering the portable gaming market dominated by Nintendo would be an uphill battle, but they didn’t join the fight without some preparation.

Despite having popular titles like Final Fantasy, Mega Man, Space Invaders, and Tetris, several factors lead to the portable’s ultimate demise. Gunpei Yokoi would…

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Mike Mertes Mike Mertes (84 Posts)

From the moment he touched an Intellivision controller in 1985, Mike knew that he had experienced something incredible in the world of video games that would shape him for the rest of his life. From that point forward, he would make it his mission to experience video games from every console generation going forward. Eventually, he would become obsessed with magazines that wrote about the games he loved, and it would inspire him to start writing about games himself in 1998 for various local media outlets. Always looking for an opportunity to branch out, Mike eventually coded the foundation of a website that would ultimately morph into Gamer Logic Dot Net, an independent video game site that continues to cover modern and classic video game today. Additional, Mike composes music for indie games under his other alias "Unleaded Logic"